onathan Turley is a professor of constitutional and
public-interest law at George Washington University Law School in
D.C. He is also a defense attorney in national security cases and
other matters, writes for a number of publications, and is often on
television. He and I occasionally exchange leads on civil liberties
stories, but I learn much more from him than he does from me.

For example, a Jonathan Turley column in the
national edition of the August 14 Los Angeles Times ("Camps
for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision") begins:

"Attorney General John Ashcroft's announced desire
for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be 'enemy combatants' has
moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a
constitutional menace." Actually, ever since General Ashcroft pushed
the U.S. Patriot Act through an overwhelmingly supine Congress soon
after September 11, he has subverted more elements of the Bill of
Rights than any attorney general in American history.

Under the Justice Department's new definition of
"enemy combatant"—which won the enthusiastic approval of the
president and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—anyone defined as an
"enemy combatant," very much including American citizens, can be
held indefinitely by the government, without charges, a hearing, or
a lawyer. In short, incommunicado.

Two American citizens—Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose
Padilla—are currently locked up in military brigs as "enemy
combatants." (Hamdi is in solitary in a windowless room.) As Harvard
Law Professor Lawrence Tribe said on ABC's Nightline (August
12):

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking
the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any
American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at
O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and
locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the
government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way. . . .
And no court can even figure out whether we've got the wrong guy."

In Hamdi's case, the government claims it can hold
him for interrogation in a floating navy brig off Norfolk, Virginia,
as long as it needs to. When Federal District Judge Robert Doumar
asked the man from the Justice Department how long Hamdi is going to
be locked up without charges, the government lawyer said he couldn't
answer that question. The Bush administration claims the judiciary
has no right to even interfere.

Now more Americans are also going to be
dispossessed of every fundamental legal right in our system of
justice and put into camps. Jonathan Turley reports that Justice
Department aides to General Ashcroft "have indicated that a
'high-level committee' will recommend which citizens are to be
stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new
camps."

It should be noted that Turley, who tries hard to
respect due process, even in unpalatable situations, publicly
defended Ashcroft during the latter's turbulent nomination battle,
which is more than I did.

Again, in his Los Angeles Times column,
Turley tries to be fair: "Of course Ashcroft is not considering
camps on the order of the internment camps used to incarcerate
Japanese American citizens in World War II. But he can be credited
only with thinking smaller; we have learned from painful
experience that unchecked authority, once tasted, easily becomes
insatiable." (Emphasis added.)

Turley insists that "the proposed camp plan should
trigger immediate Congressional hearings and reconsideration of
Ashcroft's fitness for important office. Whereas Al Qaeda is a
threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and
present threat to our liberties." (Emphasis added.)

On August 8, The Wall Street Journal, which
much admires Ashcroft on its editorial pages, reported that "the
Goose Creek, South Carolina, facility that houses [Jose]
Padilla—mostly empty since it was designated in January to hold
foreigners captured in the U.S. and facing military tribunals—now
has a special wing that could be used to jail about 20 U.S. citizens
if the government were to deem them enemy combatants, a senior
administration official said." The Justice Department has told
Turley that it has not denied this story. And space can be found in
military installations for more "enemy combatants."

But once the camps are operating, can General
Ashcroft be restrained from detaining—not in these special camps,
but in regular lockups—any American investigated under suspicion of
domestic terrorism under the new, elastic FBI guidelines for
criminal investigations? From page three of these Ashcroft terrorism
FBI guidelines:

"The nature of the conduct engaged in by a
[terrorist] enterprise will justify an inference that the standard
[for opening a criminal justice investigation] is satisfied, even
if there are no known statements by participants that advocate or
indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts."
(Emphasis added.) That conduct can be simply "intimidating" the
government, according to the USA Patriot Act.

The new Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie,
Minority Report, shows the government, some years hence,
imprisoning "pre-criminals" before they engage in, or even think of,
terrorism. That may not be just fiction, folks.

Returning to General Ashcroft's plans for American
enemy combatants, an August 8 New York Times
editorial—written before those plans were revealed—said: "The
Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority,
that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can
imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. This
defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional
law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is
defending in the struggle against terrorism."

Meanwhile, as the camps are being prepared, the
braying Terry McAuliffe and the pack of Democratic presidential
aspirants are campaigning on corporate crime, with no reference to
the constitutional crimes being committed by Bush and Ashcroft. As
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis prophesied: "The greatest
menace to freedom is an inert people." And an inert Democratic
leadership. See you in a month, if I'm not an Ashcroft camper.